Los Angeles

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Los Angeles.

Confusing, intense, serene, rough and soft, beautiful and gritty, crunchy and aloof. A city with ethereal light and a seedy underbelly (money! fame! power!). The place where dreams come true or wither and die.

Los Angeles is one of my favorite cities ever. I’ve been lucky to spend two longer-term stays there. Despite its reputation for being a weird, shallow place, I fell in love with L.A. almost instantly. And what’s there not to love for a German from the cold mountains in a place with sunshine, the ocean, and hills in a city? Nature and an enticing urban landscape, the mountains and a coast - it’s a beautiful setting.

When I was there, I became enamoured with the weird architecture and that particular, eerie L.A. light you only see, when the clouds seep in so low from the ocean you can almost touch them. It creates the weirdest effect, a photographer friend of mine called David Lynch light. When the clouds hang low at night, they reflect the yellow sheen of the what feels like every lightbulb in the city. It creates a strange golden haze that’s at the same time fascinating, spooky, and apocalypse-adjacent.

As I have a flair for the absurd, I ate all this right up.

It’s been tough following the news in the past week. Watching the destruction of the fires in a city I appreciate so much, has been touching.

And while our compassion with others should not hinge on whether we know the place or not, there is something about personal connection that draws us closer to others, even if they’re far away across the globe.

It got me thinking about our collective travel obsession. Tourism now makes up for somewhere between 6.5% to 9% of global emissions (depending on the source)*. At the same time, our ability to go anywhere much more easily than in any other point in human history has also given us the potential to come closer as people. It’s harder to see other humans as separate from yourself, when you’ve exposed yourself to their way of life.

It’s what social media could have done for us, had we taken a different path with it. Or rather, had tech companies decided to stay more true to the initial vision of a free, social internet.

Anyhow.

We live in complicated times and sometimes, often - every day? - they ask a lot from us. Compassion fatigue is real, when you’re inundated with troubling news on the daily. It’s only natural to have or want to have some sort of filter. Even as a very caring person, you can’t care about everything because you’ll only burn yourself out in the process.

You can care a little bit about many things, though - or a lot about a few. I feel that all the care aggregated (coupled with action, crucially) will eventually tilt the scales in favour of calm.

Chaos is a bit loud these days.

I suppose anything we can do to bring more calm and kindness to the world is a good step forward at present. And, to avoid the various agents of chaos as much as possible. If it makes your head spin, disengage. The truth may feel inconvenient and uncomfortable. It never makes you dizzy, though.

It’s easy to get anaesthetized by how messy the world seems right now. This will only pick up come Monday. Protecting your mind and heart from it is crucial, so you can keep showing up for whatever it is you care about.

This is one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken in L.A. I remember the light of that morning to this day. Unreal. Golden. Endless possibilities in a city stretching all the way from the mountains to the horizon, glowing in the first rays of a November sunrise.

May those gentler days return to the city.

Have a lovely day,

Johanna

PS:

*I feel less bad about this figure considering that all global military activity adds up to 5.5% of emissions worldwide. From the report: “If the world’s militaries were a country, this figure would mean they have the fourth largest national carbon footprint in the world – greater than that of Russia.” In the global hierarchy of unnecessary carbon emissions we ought to curtail, we can certainly do without that.

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